8 posts tagged “me”
What's the nerdiest thing about you?
Heh. Do I even have to answer this? Come on, who posts about an MMORPG, has a TCG set at his desk, and thinks the best kind of weekend involves a bunch of friends, tons of Mountain Dew, and Diablo II on Nightmare.
Srsly.
When was the last time you had to speak in front of a group? How did you feel?
Last time I spoke in front of a reasonably sized group was here in the office, giving my presentation about EVE Online. I actually had it all planned out, had some co-demonstrators, and things were off to a great start. Then the server crashed.
Becuse the server had issues, I got flustered and started trying to wait for it to come back, thinking it'd be a momentary disturbance. Unfortunately it wasn't. I think the presentation went okay, but I was too flustered and didn't do the things I had planned. (My awesome ending movie wasn't shown, because I forgot.)
Anyway, in general I love speaking to groups. I am certainly not afraid of public speaking, even if I'm afraid of strange random groups of people.
Do you have any tattoos? If not, if you were going to get inked, what would you get?
This is one of those weird holdovers I have from my Southern Baptist upbringing - I will never have a tattoo, nor do I think they're attractive or useful. I would also have issues with dating someone who had tattoos.
I can't really explain it. It's just how I feel. They feel wrong to me, and no matter how much I rationalize the issue (it's identifying with something you want to support or just expressing yourself, none of that is wrong or bad), my brain still cringes at the thought.
So that's that. Sorry to be a party pooper.
This picture was randomly taken of me at OSCON 2006. I was standing in the front area waiting for everybody else to get out of the talks they were in so we could go to lunch.
For being a random photo, I think it turned out really well. I feel that it captured my generally thoughtful nature, as it seems I'm distantly thinking about something. I love the coloring, I don't look white as a sheet for once. My hair is also freshly cut, which I think adds to the picture.
The background is just fuzzy enough to give you some information about what's going on. The sign shows 'Directory' which is legible and perfectly shows that I'm standing near the front of something. It's just... perfect, I think.
So yeah, thanks to Flickr user "skippy", even though I don't know who you are, you managed to capture perhaps my favorite picture of myself.
So, I like Mondays.
Yes, I threw that out there. I think Monday may be my favorite day of the week. I know, it's backwards. "Dude, Junior likes Mondays. What the hell is up with that?" I'll tell you.
Monday is the beginning of hope. You've spent the weekend relaxing, refreshing, getting your mind off of work, thinking about other things. (In general. On those weekends when Mogile gets nailed or someone exploits a security hole or something... not so relaxing. But those aside!)
For me, after that relaxation and whatever, I'm ready to get back to work. I'm ready to throw my mind back into whatever my task is. Solve those problems that were vexing me on Friday, and make some forward progress on things. I'm ready and raring to go!
This generally lasts until I get slammed with meetings. (It seems to be a management favorite that Monday = meetings!) However! Since I'm in a weird position right now with work, I have no scheduled meetings, and only meet when I need to exchange information to do my task. Hell yeah!
I've got the perfect thing going on now. Seriously. I like this sort of being. Not having to check in with somebody every second of the day, just working on what needs to be done. It frees me up to plan my day around my productivity levels, and not around arbitrary blocks of time for the exchange of information. (I should write a book about meetings, and become rich.)
So I'm going to get back to work now. Huzzah.
Current mood: happy
Current drink: Coca-Cola
Current music: Overture by Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack)
Current project: MogileFS improvements/refactoring
Current lighting: perfect! somehow the lights are on today.
When did you first realize that you were Worth Something? Was it a positive or negative experience?
My phrasing above is a bit weird. Please don't read too much into it. I'll tell a brief story, something that was a big revelation to me at the time. Something I still follow to this day.
I was young and single and wondered why I was single. I read a bunch of stuff online, and the one thing I read that stuck out in my mind is the basic thought: Women like guys who are self-confident. Not the swaggering bullies who think they're all that and then some, but the kind of guy who isn't mushing around crying in his chocolate milk in his parent's basement about how much of a loser he is.
That thought rattled around in my head for a while. Eventually I came to the conclusion that self confidence is something that can be faked. You can act one way externally and feel entirely different on the inside. So I made a deal with myself - I'd try it. I'd put on my game face and give it a whirl, see what happened.
Well, I'm not sure how much of my present life I can attribute to that decision, but I feel safe in saying that had I not made it, I'd still be that kid living in his parent's basement. I decided that wasn't for me and I reached out and made my future my own. I believed in myself, even though I didn't feel like I was worth believing in.
And that's how we end up here. I was scared shitless when I applied to go to college. When I travelled across the country to meet Janine. When I emailed Brad to come work for LiveJournal. But by believing in myself, it ended up working out. In most cases, better than I could have ever imagined.
Dinner for two, yummy as it was, $100 is a bit pricey for food! Good lord!
So, we went to Shadowbrook Restaurant, a little place down in Capitola-by-the-Sea, as they called it. It's a nice restaurant, great food, friendly service, and a really unique arrangement.
The place itself has tons of little rooms and nooks and lots of tables. It's a very romantic style place, with nice music playing, and the menu even says "please silence your cell phones". Crazy, that.
I had a Prime Rib and Janine had a Seafood Linguine. It was very tasty, but we were pretty full since we ate lunch only three hours earlier. (Whoops.) I did enjoy it quite a bit, though, and would recommend it to anybody looking for an interesting place to go eat.
Definitely make early reservations though, as the parking lot fills up incredibly fast. When we left, people were circling to find a spot to sit. Hah. Anyway, Janine said she loved it, so that's a success.
To get to the place, instead of going straight down 880 to 17 to 1, I took us north on 880 to take 92 westwards across the San Mateo bridge all the way to the coast, where we took 1 south to Capitola. The drive was very, very pretty. To the right is a shot of the road we were on, when we pulled over to take some pictures.
Apparently it was a really great day for having the surfers get out there and do some windsurfing. They were out in force, tearing up the waves. This picture only captured a small portion of the group. It's rather impressive how many there were, just zipping around. I don't have any idea how they avoided running into eachother.
Oh yes. The restaurant was a fairly nice place, with "dressy casual" as the recommended attire. So we did! Here's a picture of Janine, in a pretty dress skirt that she bought a while back while we were out shopping with her sister and brother-in-law. I think she is very pretty, and the dress outfit is just awesome.
And here's a picture of me. Hurrah! I was wearing a fairly bland pair of khakis with a dress shirt that I picked up a few months ago. It's a nice outfit, and was actually a little more dressy than many of the other patrons at the restaurant.
Anyway, now we're changing into regular clothes and we're going to go see X-Men 3. Should be entertaining, even if I haven't heard great reviews about it. I loved the first two movies, I hope the third is at least near that caliber.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this post. I am absolutely in love with Vox's ability to make posts like this so effortless. This is truly how the Internet should be.
Vox team - way to go!
